L’IM_MAGE_N

About

The exhibition will be on view June 28 – August 4, 2019, with an opening reception Friday, June 28th, from 6–8 PM.

The title of the exhibition is a play on the word image, folding it into different linguistic aspects yet allowing for the stability of decipherment. This wordplay opens the curtain into the shifting world of language and its limits while acknowledging the ability to maintain meaning through transformation. One could look at this through the rhetoric of the pop image, denoting a distillation or simplification into something symbolically new.

According to Wittgenstein, the world consists entirely of facts and human beings are cognizant of these facts by virtue of our mental representations of thoughts, which are most fruitfully understood as picturing the way things are. As the facts of an image are translated through the artist’s hands, a vestigial aspect of meaning remains. 

An idea, transubstantiated and given meaning through the agency of the artist into a visual, formal reality is something of a kind of alchemy. The elusive prima materia with which the alchemist works assumes form in the image and, with a wave of the sorcerer’s wand, a transformation of spirit into matter is enacted. This is about a magical process, ineffable yet able to be seen. While elements become re-arranged, the image can still be read and understood—if not intellectually, then psychically. So, although image is passed through a sieve, its meaning contains vestiges of its origin.

But what of the object? Again, as interpretation and mutation occur, there is an alchemy to the transference of the pop image. As shape, form, and content rip through the fabric of the second dimension and transpose themselves through the glass darkly via the artist’s hands, a new, radical icon emerges. The sacredness of the object is retained and perhaps the MAGE, the image maker, the wizard, reveals a mystic truth.

_Timothy Hull